In the following essay, Wall examines Clifton's exploration of the past through the reconstruction of family genealogy in Generations.

in populated air our ancestors continue i have seen them. i have heard their shimmering voices singing.

Lucille Clifton, Two-Headed Woman

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

On the cusp of a new century, black women's writing has been preoccupied with the recuperation and representation of the past two hundred years of black people's lives in the United States and throughout the African diaspora. A confluence of social and historical events enabled the creation of “the community of black women writing” in the United States that Hortense Spillers designated a “vivid new fact of...